I'm an Apple guy, always have been. I'm just not part of the cult - indoctrinated to believe absolutely everything Apple does is pure genius, the absolute best possible choice, and the only 1 true innovator in the world.

I'm just not going to call 'polish' or incremental updates... innovation. Sorry.

I'm also not going to call technology developed by other companies - purchased by Apple - as Apple Innovation.

For if I was to credit them - I would have to credit Microsoft for being one of the biggest innovators of all time when they were buying up tech companies like crazy in the 80-90's.

Of course, like movies it's always easy for critics to call a flop on the opening night and call it a masterpiece after a few years.

Beside the first iPhone, none of your example as shaken the world as innovating products when being announced. The iPod was seen as an overpriced Nomad MP3 player and the iPad like a big iPhone no good for content creation, no need to argue about the Antennagate.

This post is about the initial news release of the 5C & 5S (and all the associated tech stuff) without the lengthy quote:

Apple delivers some fine new products and the stock tanks > 10 bucks. Guess they didn't offer a "teleportation option" (or some other mega-wow app). Great isn't it? What does Apple have to do to get Wall Street etc., to believe they are a great US company and here for the long term?

If you cannot see the merits of a 64bit throughout OS then you truly don't understand OS and App Development. If you think it's all about the RAM footprint then please just stop speculating.

The real reason these suckers don't have 8G/16GB is the same reason we don't have 256GB/512GB/1TB in a Workstation/Desktop/Laptop configuration.

The next revolution in memory density is nearly upon us and having your OS and Apps ready to leverage from the ground up when it happens instead of being caught with your pants down for years is something Apple learned during the creation of OS X.

In 3-6 months Samsung is going to be dumping onto the market 64-bit hackneyed APUs for their smartphones and every single Android fanatic will tout it up.

Meanwhile, the App base and n-tier of services will continue to evolve at Apple while it's been hard at work on the iPhone 6 for next year, no doubt incorporating any new memory density advances and much more.

Motion APIs, along with all the new APIs in iOS7 and OS X are going to be a huge selling point for Apple.

Datacenter expansion with more advanced cloud services will just expand the ecosystem.

No mention of AppleTV and contracts with content providers means we have a lot more to come.

Lots of good points here!

The potential of the little box we know as the AppleTV especially interests me. For one, 4K video is coming...

But more than that, I wonder if they put an A7 (or A7x) inside the ATV enclosure and added Thunderbolt 2, some additional SSD and RAM. These ATV-like "modules" could be combined into a server farm -- or even a video render-farm for the new Mac Pro. Apple has existing software to parcel out compute/graphics-intensive jobs to multiple Macs... I think the 64-bit A7 chip means that headless, low-power, inexpensive ARM boxes could be used instead of Intel boxes.

"Swift generally gets you to the right way much quicker." - auxio -

"The perfect [birth]day -- A little playtime, a good poop, and a long nap." - Tomato Greeting Cards -

Awesome, so it's much better than 2 and 3 year old phones...I would hope so. If you arent making a better product after that amount of time there is a big problem. Is it good enough to keep people from leaving Apple? I guess we'll know in three weeks.

Is a slightly cheaper phone going to cut it? Once again, people spending $550 probably arent going to shy away from $650 so is that going to increase sales? Guess we'll know for sure in a couple weeks, but I would think not.

All in all Google is demoing Glass, Samsung is talking about a watch...I think people want to see what new product Apple is going to come out with. Cook did promise new products all throughout 2014. Lets see if that was just more rhetoric.

While the rest of the industry loose focus and waver in all possible direction, Apple improves on what's already a lot more advanced than the rest, and takes it miles apart even beyond what the others can fathom. It's what Steve mentioned. Laser Focus !

If the phone has less than 4GB RAM (probably) the 64bit is largely useless, especially for the average consumer. A nice surprise though. Outpacing the ARMv8's to the market.

This isn't true at all! Addressing cleanly large amounts of RAM is of course one thing a 64 bit processor does well but there is more to computing than RAM. Some software (not all by any means) can really take advantage of those 64 bit registers to enhance performance. So in some cases 64 bit means better performance at lower power levels than adding more cores. Beyond that simply extending data paths in the processor so that communications with GPUs and other devices is enhanced can be seen as performance booster. Do this all in 64 bit land and you minimize circuit complexity.

The interesting thing here is that we will see a round of software improvements that will likely make software (apps) faster on the iPhone S over the following year. 64 bit simply gives developer more room to improve things.

You do bring up an interesting question though, will these phones come with more RAM. Frankly it is a big shortcoming in the iPad though I don't feel that limitation as much in the iPhone. Speaking of iPad, I can't wait! I use my iPad far more than my iPhone and if this chip does what is implied it will be a very significant upgrade over my current iPad.

So the article about 64 bit was correct, but boy were they wrong about their claimed 31% speed improvement.

I was half expecting 64 bit though I'm somewhat surprised that they got 2x performance improvements again. If you look at the pace Apple has been on here it is rather impressive. The real question is this, is that an all around 2X improvement or is there a lot of variability in the improvement.

Considering the low clock rates of Apples previous chips I suspect that they have plenty of head room when it comes to operating frequency. So maybe with all the combined improvements hitting 2X wasn't that hard this time. How long they can keep that up is a different question.

They could have named this the iPhone 6, there are so much difference internally, Samsung would jump 2 numbers, who by the way must be sh*tting their pants for the rest of the week? Samsung's next galaxy phone is months away, but I don't think it's enough time to catch up.

I'm going to assume Apple was having too many scuffing issues with the slate mode and decided to replace it with something that doesn't scuff as easily.

It's possible. I was curious why Apple didn't hard anodize the back plates in iPhone 5 (or at least, it doesn't seem like they have). Perhaps this is what they are doing this time. Hard anodizing changes the color. Also, it is tricky to get a super consistent hue when hard anodizing. So I am not sure 100% sure.

The first embedded OS [iOS] that is 64 bit, throughout to match up with OS X.

Hadn't really thought of it that way...

But yeah...

Add to that the fact that the 2 OSes share many common APIs, and some creative packaging (instead of fat binaries) -- you could run many iOS apps on the OSX desktop by installing only the code required for the underlying architecture...

The implementation of the touch UI in the iOS Simulator is pretty good -- and they could become a OSX system capability... In fact, some Mavericks apps already do this -- OSX Maps, for one!

"Swift generally gets you to the right way much quicker." - auxio -

"The perfect [birth]day -- A little playtime, a good poop, and a long nap." - Tomato Greeting Cards -

The first embedded OS [iOS] that is 64 bit, throughout to match up with OS X.

It is not the first 64-bit embedded OS. Wind Rivers released the 64-bit version of VxWorks a few years ago.

But I agree with you that this is a big deal, particularly since they squeezed it into the same form factor and are providing the same battery life. As I wrote elsewhere, this might be the most understated jump in the kernel of a widely used OS in the history of computing.

Add to that the fact that the 2 OSes share many common APIs, and some creative packaging (instead of fat binaries) -- you could run many iOS apps on the OSX desktop by installing only the code required for the underlying architecture...

The implementation of the touch UI in the iOS Simulator is pretty good -- and they could become a OSX system capability... In fact, some Mavericks apps already do this -- OSX Maps, for one!

No doubt, and like the desktop world 64 bit will be the future. But there's still inherent differences in the move that made 64bit critical in the CISC/Intel x86 world that mean less in the RISC/ARM world. IMO it would have more scalability potential to the iPad going forward and the on/off-rumored A-Series powered Macbook Airs than the iPhone.

Of course it would have more value in the iPad, but you don't want one part of your platform gimped just because 64 bit isn't as useful there. Beyond that you have to look towards the future, I fully expect to see Apple debut an iPhone one day that can be docked in such a way that it transforms into your desktop computer solution. The hardware to do this isn't far away at all, you need very high density RAM which is coming and a way to drive a desktop monitor (Thunderbolt maybe). The rest can be done wirelessly.

As to a Mac Book AIR power by this chip, oh boy! 😱😍😱😃😍😱. It would very much depend upon the final configuration but I could see myself salivating over such a machine. This especially the case if Apple focuses on all day or better battery life. It would need to run Mac OS though and give me the same freedom of access to the OS.

In any event A7 impresses me. We haven't seen independent tests yet but Apple has been pretty close with previous improvement estimates. So right now I will take their word for it. This will be most impressive in the iPad though and that will likely be the first place I will be using one of Apples new super chips. As I've said before this sets Apple up to be at the fore front of personal device development. They now have a 64 bit chip suitable for cell phones, no one else can really claim that at this point.

In any event don't be dismissive of the accomplishment here. It is a certainty that 64 bit will be more useful in iPad apps, but this puts Apple on course for the next decade of iOS devices.

The potential of the little box we know as the AppleTV especially interests me. For one, 4K video is coming...

But more than that, I wonder if they put an A7 (or A7x) inside the ATV enclosure and added Thunderbolt 2, some additional SSD and RAM. These ATV-like "modules" could be combined into a server farm -- or even a video render-farm for the new Mac Pro. Apple has existing software to parcel out compute/graphics-intensive jobs to multiple Macs... I think the 64-bit A7 chip means that headless, low-power, inexpensive ARM boxes could be used instead of Intel boxes.

I think a lot of people would be willing to pony up $199 for the A7 based AppleTV with a 32GB storage with TB2, HDMI 2.0, USB3.0 running the entire AppStore with 64 bit Games that can be shared across OS X and leverage perhaps any OS X box GPGPU for processing scenes and more.

Outside Of the Box:

Make the box a break even venture and then up-sell the controller and few add-ons to break into the market even more.

Even charging $299 to come with a 64GB storage option while streaming textures from a USB 3.0 128GB Thumb Drive accessory or a NAS connected via the TB2 would be a really disruptive ecosystem third-party market opportunity.

It would require Game Developers to include deals with Thumb drive manufacturers to offer add-on library packs via cloud servers or direct thumb sticks that could either be kept on the stick or copied to your local NAS/Mac, what have you that can be accessible as an available resource for the GPGPU to source.

There are all kinds of ways vendors can see the Apple TV as a killer box for both Video/Audio Entertainment, Gaming, Business presentations, etc.

It is not the first 64-bit embedded OS. Wind Rivers released the 64-bit version of VxWorks a few years ago.

But I agree with you that this is a big deal, particularly since they squeezed it into the same form factor and are providing the same battery life. As I wrote elsewhere, this might be the most understated jump in the kernel of a widely used OS in the history of computing.

And it does what again? Not to forget I tied in the 64 Bit OS that works directly with it's parent OS. What again did Wind Rivers do with that 64 bit embedded OS that ties in with say Linux? Windows? Solaris? etc?

It is not the first 64-bit embedded OS. Wind Rivers released the 64-bit version of VxWorks a few years ago.

But I agree with you that this is a big deal, particularly since they squeezed it into the same form factor and are providing the same battery life. As I wrote elsewhere, this might be the most understated jump in the kernel of a widely used OS in the history of computing.

Well I'm not sure I'd go that far but this is huge, they are effectively the first to market with a 64 bit ARM solution in a hand held pocketable cell phone. As you note with full OS support and the same battery life.

I'm not a big iPhone user but this should be significant for the iPad. However the iPad really needs more RAM, lots more actually. I'm excited about the possibilities.